Poetry Reading

THEME: TRANSGRESSIVE

Featuring C. Kubasta & Tom Erickson

Two award-winning poets sharing their latest work.

C. Kubasta

C. Kubasta writes poetry, prose & hybrid forms. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, the full-length collections, All Beautiful & Useless(BlazeVOX) and Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press), and the novella Girling(Brain Mill Press). Her novel This Business of the Flesh is newly out from Apprentice House. She teaches literature, writing & cultural studies at Marian University, where she is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and works with Brain Mill Press. Find her at ckubasta.com. Follow her @CKubastathePoet.

Sample Poem

On Being a Midwestern Poet

Because he spends tens of minutescomplimenting your work –your sharp lines & incongruous images, useswords like “deft,” then wondershow anyone can live there, comments how there’sno culture, nothingto write about. Tu quoque. It is about

more than line, more than ink. It is about how that inksettles into skin. Skin is different than paper – it shifts, settles, ages. Argumentum ad lapidem. You can feel

your vowels spreading, the idioms pepperingyour reply, hoping hewon’t be able to follow. You remind himyou live there. “Yes,” he says, “but you left.” Post hoc

ergo propter hoc. Contextomy. And returned. By choice. These are my people.

Here. Where our only elevationsare septic mounds or reclaimed landfills beyondthe perimeter of townwhere as children we learnedspeed, fear, exhilaration. Argumentum ad antiquitatem. And

they are always named “Garbage Hill.” Each town

has one. The way each townhas one of me, sitting in the local bar, like the strange rock found picking the fields, brought homefor its unusual color, or the impression that may be a fossilidentified some future day when it will be shown to the local extension agent. Celebratedor tolerated, some local color, rarelyread. Argumentum ex silentio. The way the smell

of the ethanol plant is first welcomed, uncannily like syrup, but then

turns the stomach. But each of these houses can still be breachedthrough the forgotten milk box (if you can fit), or maybe the coal chute.

This is something we criminals know. Ad hominem. We adult childrenof these places we call home.

Tom Erickson

Thomas J. Erickson grew up in Kohler, Wisconsin. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English Composition from Beloit College and a law degree from Marquette University. He is an attorney in Milwaukee, where he is a member of the Hartford Avenue Poets. His award-winning chapbook, “The Lawyer Who Died in the Courthouse Bathroom” was published by Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin Libraries in 2013. His full length poetry book, “The Biology of Consciousness”, was published in 2016 by Pebblebrook Press. His chapbook, “Hailstorm Interlude”, will be published in the fall of 2018 by Finishing Line Press. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife, Daphne, and is the proud father of Charles and John.

Sample Poem

In an Empty Courtroom

To my surprise, no one’s around. The bailiffs are getting the prisoner from the jail; the clerk’s in the back somewhere; the judge still at lunch.

The defense table is skirted with heavy black cloth to prevent the jury from seeing the defendant shackled to the iron rings cemented to the floor.

The clerk’s station is adorned with a few withering plants. On the wall is a portrait of a long-dead judge gazing down on me with bored benevolence.

I run my hand the length of the polished wood in front of the jury box. Looking up, I can see the scattershot of dead bugs in the big light fixtures suspendedlike dim globes about to fall.

I take the witness stand and look outat the empty gallery and wonder what to say or whom to answer. I wonder too about the time I have spent in this room and the representations I have made—of my clients and of myself.

Someday, surely, this courtroom will shutter, this place of deliberation and whim, of bondage or freedom. A shelland a citadel. And now, a place, for me, of a sudden discordant contentment.